


War

by The_Lady_Meg



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, M/M, Spoilers for TFA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 01:09:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6494896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lady_Meg/pseuds/The_Lady_Meg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia would never admit it, but there are days she misses the Rebellion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	War

She’d never admit it, but there are days she misses the Rebellion. Clear goals, an enemy to hate, two sides with a gulf between them. Clear-cut and easy to understand. She misses the certainty of being right, of knowing her place in the galaxy.

She misses not knowing her birth father’s identity. Not her true father: that honour will forever belong to Bail Organa, who raised her and was proud of her and told her tales of her mother’s bravery and cleverness. Except now those stories are tainted, knowing that the man who was at her mother’s side was the man Leia swore to kill when she was little more than a child. He’s dead now, has been for years, but she still loathes him with every fibre of her being.

Luke has forgiven him, but Leia still remembers Alderaan, her parents and her sisters and her friends. She remembers Han frozen in carbonite and Luke’s missing hand and all the countless lives lost to Darth Vader’s evil, and even if she wanted to she cannot forgive him. Luke forever tells her that she needs to let go of her anger and hate and grief, because she is a Force user and that comes with a responsibility to use it wisely.

Leia, quite frankly, thinks that’s bantha shit.

Her anger kept her resolute and her hatred gave her focus and her grief made her unrelenting. She is no Jedi, and she refuses to be bound by the constraints Luke insists upon. She has a husband and a son and a brother and friends and coworkers, people to protect, and if she needs a weapon then what better weapon is there than one that can never be taken from her? So she learns to sense blaster shots and space ships and people walking down the corridor. She learns how to levitate random objects in her house, and droids, and Han when they’re arguing. (The first time was an accident. The rest weren’t.) She spreads her consciousness over the galaxy and feels where her loved ones are, so she can always know that they are safe.

She Force-chokes an assassin that comes for her and Han in the middle of the night and feels no regret, because this being would have killed her and her husband and her son. She’d have shot him if there had been a blaster nearby, but there wasn’t, so this was the next best thing.

Luke doesn’t see it that way, of course. He argues that the Force should only ever be used to defend or protect, not to kill. She has had a very long night at that point, loses her tenuous grasp on her temper, and asks him if he went to the Death Star with the intention to protect and defend the Emperor or Darth Vader. She asks why invading someone’s mind to “plant suggestions” is acceptable but using the Force to protect her loved ones isn’t. Why the Jedi have lightsabers at all if they’re merely protectors. She screams herself hoarse at him and some part of her knows it isn’t fair, but someone tried to kill her and her family during peacetime. She has had little experience with peace, but she knows this isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Han wraps her in his arms and she cries on his chest and lets him be the strong one for once. She lets him and Lando (who’s visiting them because they’re all very bad at letting go of the past and he and Han were important to each other long before Leia was in the picture) tell Luke to leave and send Ben back to bed.

And then they talk, the three of them. About acceptable uses of the Force and war and blasters and how none of them understand peace because none of them have ever known it. She tells them of her fear of losing them and her determination never to use the mind tricks the Jedi are so fond of and the network of old Rebellion friends that have contacted her about a new power in the galaxy, calling themselves the First Order. Lando has plans for Bespin and a new ship that he says will be faster than the Falcon and for increasing his squadron of fighters in case this First Order turns out to be important. Han tells them they’re both worrying for nothing (she finds Chewie taking inventory of the Falcon’s reserves and fixing the shield generator the next day, and doesn’t mention it to anyone) and that Luke will come around and he doesn’t really see the difference between killing someone with the Force or a blaster, because they end up dead anyway.

They go to sleep eventually, only waking when Ben jumps on Han and asks for pancakes for breakfast, and reassure him that uncle Luke will be coming back at some point. A few years and many (much more civilised) discussions between Luke and Leia about Force usage, they wave goodbye to their son as he goes off with Luke to train.

Ben disappears from Luke’s school and Leia has never been this terrified, because that’s her baby, her only son that has gone missing. Han and Lando and Chewie scour the galaxy for over a year while she spends hours between military briefings and political wrangling when she should be sleeping reaching out over the galaxy trying to find her boy. The First Order is growing, not enough yet to become a threat to the New Republic, but enough to worry her, and there are less and less hours for reaching out for Ben, but she makes do. She always has.

Lando and Han are back for a short time, all together for the first time in months, when she feels it, like a jagged lightsaber wound in the Force. Her son. She can feel him, but he’s wrong, all wrong, and there are other Force users around him, but they’re fading fast.

She and her husband and their partner sit there for hours, trying to wrap their minds around the fact that their son is a murderer. Their search for him was always going to be fruitless because their son didn’t want to be found.

A figure in black is sighted with First Order Stormtroopers, and Leia knows instinctively that it’s Ben. Kylo Ren, now, but he’ll always be Ben to her, even if she can never forgive him for the massacre of Luke’s students. The First Order starts gaining ground and support fast now, as if they had merely been waiting to reveal themselves.

She remembers thinking that she might grow old in peacetime and watch her son grow up, and could laugh at her own naivety. She is so furiously angry at those who have destroyed her family yet again, and guilty over Ben, and frustrated with the New Republic and their inability to see a threat under their kriffing noses, but she buries it under the calm and cunning she digs back up from her years as Princess Leia, hero of the Rebellion, and builds the Resistance with Lando and her old Rebellion friends at her side. Han comes back occasionally, Chewie in tow, on the rustbucket the Falcon has become, before it’s stolen from him somewhere in the Outer Rim and he goes back to smuggling and scouring the galaxy for his ship as he’d once looked for his son. He’s never been able to do the grunt work necessary for building something like this, so she lets him go and checks up on him periodically using the Force, knowing he needs to be doing something, not sitting around in meetings. She’s never been superstitious but the Falcon has got them out of too many impossible situations for her to fault Han for looking for it.

Her husband has left her, her son is either as evil as his grandfather or a pawn in the hands of one who is, and the First Order controls more than half the Galaxy. She is the leader of the new Resistance, and she hates herself for ever missing war.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be a full series of character studies because I have feelings about the Star Wars characters and I'm going to inflict them on you. Leave me a comment if there's any particular aspect of a character you'd like to see :)


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